Is there any place more depressing than an airport bar? There's the palpably fake ambience, the grotesquely overpriced drinks, the sort of service you'd normally associate with the more antisocial government agencies and then there is that damned kid who just won't shut up. As a foretaste of hell, the average airport bar has few rivals.
However, I can think of a place that makes even the Bach Alehouse at the Auckland domestic terminal seem like the sort of hip and happening nightspot that Jay-Z might be spotted at rather than a holding pen for those having one last drink before getting on a plane to Palmerston North. That place is the average hotel bar.
In all my years of globetrotting and drinking (the former often actually caused by the latter), one feeling that I can never shake off is that dread of popping your head into a hotel bar.
All human misery is there: the dead-eyed look of resigned acceptance on the bartender's face, who now realises he should have gone to university; the brittle-looking woman nervously hoping her smartphone and her underpowered G&T will stave off the unpleasant sexual ambitions of the overpoweringly cologned sales rep sitting at the next table; the little bowls of snacks that are supposed to be a welcoming offering of hospitality but always end up causing a terrible existential angst that other people have been pawing them all night.
